Casement, McNulty and the border poll bluff: has nationalism lost its map?

“Unceasingly we are bombarded with pseudo-realities. Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.”

—Philip K. Dick

As I was on Nolan this morning talking about the situation with scramblers and anti social behaviours one of the callers from Derry highlighted an abiding truth about democratic politics everywhere : “policy is the thing that runs through everything”.

It’s rare both nationalist parties appear in the dock of the front pages in two of Northern Ireland’s biggest daily newspapers on the same day. The Irish News’s accuses DUP Communities Minister Gordon Lyons of a lack of transparency on the Casement Park debacle (just one of several major nationalist infrastructure failures).

Some 30 out of 31 documents requested under FOI have been redacted around a project first mooted twenty years ago. The redacted information includes minutes of meetings between the minister, special adviser, and others in redevelopment discussions.

This signal project has succeeded only in demolishing the once iconic GAA ground in the heart of West Belfast. In the meantime the refurbishments at Ravenhill and Windsor Park have long since faded into the rear view mirror of history.

If you wanted better proof that nationalism has been hopeless at getting relatively uncontroversial things done, Casement is it. And Sinn Féin’s policy of never admitting and never apologising for its mistakes (policy or otherwise) has not served it well.

The SDLP which has the opposite problem got itself into hot water over private attempts to oust one of the few rural MLAs it has in its Assembly team. Apparently it was leaked to the press via a disgruntled councillor who got wind of the manoeuvre.

It’s not the first time they’ve tried to get rid of Justin McNulty, and it may not be the last (the local selection process is ongoing as we speak), but the fact it was leaked by a councillor on their own team suggests not everyone is on board with HQ’s plans.

Claire Hanna has a style and work rate that has been missing from many of her predecessors. And Matthew O’Toole likewise is a eloquent communicator who often resonates with the public, and is treated as a serious actor by media on both islands.

But the truth is that the most successful political parties rely on building a coalition of people with often profound differences in interests (much as Sinn Féin did in the early days by taking a lumps out of the SDLP’s support), and giving it coherence.

It’s hard to see a growth strategy when the leadership is picking fights it may not be able to win in seats it already holds. Pick winners in seats you don’t already have. And take defeat gracefully. Winners aren’t easy to find when you’re down on your luck.

The current southern minister of Public Expenditure, Infrastructure, Public Service Reform beat Micheál Martin’s hand picked man black and blue at the selection convention back in 2015. The leader’s response: embrace him as a winner.

In truth Irish nationalism is living in a “fantasyland” where the story of an imminent United Ireland ignores the stagnant reality of electoral data: between a lucid “daydream” of a border poll with the hard, mathematical requirements of political power.

When LBJ became Senate leader he was renowned for his fastidious approach to numbers. He knew that the sluggish upper chamber had spent most of the previous 100 years or so spending most of its time blocking contemporary measures.

He brokered umpteen deals with improbable partners in part because he was obsessed with finding out what votes he could reliably count out to get measure A or measure B past a fractious upper house. In doing so he built a solid cross party network.

The same is true in Northern Ireland, where Power is tiered through the Stormont Assembly, the Executive, and the joint office of the First and Deputy First Minister. Each level requires specific “numbers” (votes and seats) to exert parliamentary influence.

Sinn Fein clearly understands this, the SDLP doesn’t, yet. But where both fall down is policy. There’s a reason nationalism hasn’t budged even as unionism has declined: because with all the opportunities they’ve had, they’ve done nothing.

As the poet said, ‘nothing comes from nothing’. And their rivals are beginning to notice the void beneath the assertions for a border poll and that it’s all the Brits fault, or the Taoiseach’s fault they’ve not achieved anything. Meanwhile the stagnation continues.

Given a plurality of those joining the electorate have been Catholic since John Major was Prime Minister, it’s shocking there’s been no progress for political nationalism in Northern Ireland. In fact the mention of such failure only seems to push some to embrace the full Kneecap effect.

Away from nationalism, unionism appears to be in an interesting flux, with the incoming of a political leader in Jon Burrows who is unusual in Northern Irish politics in that he hasn’t really been immersed in the fatalistic culture of Stormont’s long running game of beggar thy neighbour.

He’s not been a political apparachik, didn’t go to Queens like so many others in the current political class did but instead studied Law and Criminality at Ulster and worked as a police officer both inside and outside Northern Ireland. In short, he doesn’t need to be politics, but chose to join later in life.

And it kinda shows. He’s the first Unionist leader I’ve heard talk up Northern Ireland as a place to live and work. He’s also the first to really talk up the benefits of talking up and building a politics of the future rather than deliberately endlessly about what’s been wrong in the past. And he doesn’t seem to worry about breaking the rules.

In particular, note how his challenge to Michelle O’Neill drew instant disapproval from rival unionist leader Jim Allister, dismissed the offer to debate O’Neill as misguided, saying unionists “should not engage in a debate which has no end point”.

Burrows’ response was to explain that by calling for a debate first, he had already set the terms of the debate and claimed he would “make the incontrovertible case for our Union and dismantle Sinn Féin’s empty rhetoric and false promises.”

It’s as though he’s read and understood the lesson from the Long Peace project which in many ways was the primer for the start of Slugger itself. We drew on Game Theory to show only future focused cooperation would bring political success to NI:

…to transform the game by increasing the rewards for cooperation. You enlarge the shadow of the future by creating an expectation that the future will be better than the present. Success helps keep both friends and enemies closeand encourages all participants to judge the system through actions rather than words. And the more people are winning, the easier it becomes to avoid envy.

O’Neill should debate him, although since she’s said yes, there’s been no further indication that this great contest is shaping up to actually happen. And if she fails to stand up to the mark, then Claire Hanna could pick up Burrows’ thrown gauntlet.

And yet, I’m not sure either of them will. A unionist leader who endorses the Belfast Agreement, who has done some thinking about what Northern Ireland has achieved through peace and what change it needs more of, would make a tricky southpaw.

He’s not as easily dismissed as a fringe actor as Allister is, and cannot be treated dismissively as the tribal enemy of Catholics in the DUP were happy to make of themselves for many years and whose internal contradictions are now pathetically on display.

Having warmed themselves at the bonfire of unionist decline for many years, what’s becoming increasingly clear is that nationalism itself has lost touch with their mission and is stranded without a map to get towards the future it says it wants.

Of the meet up between Sinn Féin, Plaid and the SNP, Micheál Martin (the only Irish national leader with a plan) called it a “strategic error of some magnitude”, saying the future should not be viewed “through the prism” of the wider British Union.

Pat Leahy probably summed it up best recently when he noted that “Sinn Féin’s strategy is built on the hope that something will turn up”. That and voter emnity towards a unionist opponent that has too often reveled in making itself the perfect enemy.

Since Mr Burrows seems determined to break the old mould perhaps Ms O’Neill might be better advised to “take a beat” as they say and consider whether she and her party have the wherewithal to take on someone with a rival version of the future?